I am fulfilled. the elements of nature, the body and senses, what are they to me? or the mind? what is emptiness or despair?

I am boundless space. the world is a clay pot. this is the truth. there is nothing to accept. nothing to reject, nothing to dissolve.

know you are one, pure awareness. with the fire of this conviction burn down the forest of ignorance. free yourself from sorrow and be happy.

you are always the same, unfathomable awareness, limitless and free, serene and unperturbed. desire only your own awareness.

the ultimate consciousness is always present everywhere. it is always present everywhere. it is beyond space and time with not before or after. it is undesirable and obvious. so what can be said about it? you are it.

the birth and dissolution of the cosmos itself takes place in me. there is nothing that exists separate me. the entire universe is suspended from me as my necklace of jewels.

God is both Person and Nonperson for the Hasid. God becomes Person by assuming intellect and emotions in order to become known to man. However, that is NOT God per say, but an emmanation of God. God is Absolute and unrelating Infinite (Ain Sof) before the contradiction of God’s Light, or what is known. God’s Light is and is not identical with Ain Sof, just as the sunlight is and is not identical with the Sun. In the lower worlds, in “creation” God’s Presence is Shekhinah. Shekhinah is personified as the Divine Spouce, our Divine Mother, who is in exile. The Shekhinah is held prisoner in innumerable little sparks, awaiting redemption in our hands….–Wrapped in Holy Flames: Teachings of the Hasidic Masters

This afternoon one of my co-workers stood in my office sobbing. Every few seconds she would catch her breath, sort of gaining composure, only to drift back into tears. She poured out, between the bursts of sniffles, her gutwrenching story of an inexplicable break up. The boy she loved claimed to no longer love, or even worse, no longer to need her. It was actually more complicated than that really. I suppose it always is. As she neared the end of her story, she asked candidly, “What do I do?”

Ugh.

And what do I say? My mind is a perfect blank slate. I just sort of stammered something already obvious and then offered a hug. What’s amazing about that encounter is that I see it happen often enough. All of our high flying talk about “the cross” and “suffering” and “love” and “the impossible” and “miracles” and “resurrection” and “choice” disappear in the face of pain. The problem of pain for me isn’t the inability to explain its existence. The problem of pain is simply knowing how to love the person who doesn’t NEED the explanation. While we can glibly say that the hug is enough, and it may be for some, there is still the expectant look on the other’s face waiting for the words that will irrevocably release them.

I have no such Word.
While I can say something pious such as “God sees when even the smallest of sparrow’s falls to the ground,” the inevitable response is simply that the sparrow still falls…now what?

It’s then that I’m left with saying the most honest thing imaginable, “I don’t know what to say.”

This is the final installment of an introductory position paper I’m calling “The Impossible Now” or “Towards a Theology of the Impossible.” There are three previous parts. You can find them here, here, and here. In this final installment I talk about “the religious question.” Cheers!

…The im/possible is refusing, as it always does, to be pinned down and become a part of someone’s strategic planning. It will always retreat from our view, from our expectation, from our massaging of what is possible, and back into the realm of the unexpected and truly unimaginable….

The Event of the im/possible cannot be prepared for and at the same time cannot be depended on. These are horrible words to hear for strategic planning! How then do we live with such (non)knowledge? If authenticity, imagination and experiment are the tools that we shape the relative future with, what are the tools we use to embrace the wildcard future—the im/possible? What can we possibly do or say or prepare in reference to something that lies so completely out of our ability to do or say or prepare for? It is for this place, this absurd, unexpected, undeterminable place that a different set of internal reservoirs are needed. Religion, good religion, seeks to address this sort of question.

Having done all to encounter the present in a meaningful way, we are still often left with seemingly meaningless events that continually take us by surprise, disturbing our best laid plans. This realization is, at its highest, a religious experience. It doesn’t require belief in a Personal Origin, or First Cause. But it does require something of us. That much is certain. The “what” is actually rather well-known. The attributes I’m going to mention are in many ways universals. They’re what philosopher’s might call “un-deconstructables,” in that they are ideals—almost always un-fully-realized urges that keep us reaching toward them. The most famous of Jesus’ early followers, the apostle Paul, said it best, in my opinion, “…in the end, these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love.”

This simple three word formula provides the basis for the intersection between the im/possible and the real. Faith isn’t so much a mental adherence to theoretical propositions about the nature of truth, but rather living today in the light of the future as it should be. Faith sees the idealized Peaceful Tomorrow, the future where swords have been beaten into plowshares, and tanks made into tractors, and determines to live peaceably today, even while the world is filled with wars and rumors of wars. Faith is an active, aggressive leap forward toward the Good, the Just, and the Best in spite of evidence contrary. Faith is an investment in particularity and locality, refusing to be theoretical and (merely) universal. Faith is always personal, though hardly private.

Hope isn’t the spindly sickly stuff of fantasy; it’s longing contentment. Hope sees the possibility of renewal and resurrection where others see lifelessness or death. Hope believes in commonality, compassion and a desire for connection with the Other where fear informs us that only Strangers and Monsters await on the other side of the unknown.

And love…Love is the greatest of these. Even faith and hope must give way before love. What can be said of love? Those who have known both Love and God have said that God is Love. If God can be spoken of and said to be anything at all, God is spoken of as and said to be Love. The substance of the divine is bound up in love. Concrete love. Active love. Visible, tangible, touchable love. Love, which covers a multitude of sins. Love which walks the extra mile. Love which gives up the second coat. Love which willingly lays down its life for another, for the Other. Love, of whom we may sing a thousand songs.

Our deep need to account for the unaccounted for, forces us to build up, to work on, a different skill set entirely. The things that are simply cannot prepare us for the things that are not. For those sorts of im/possible occurrences we must draw on the deep fountains that lurk at the corner of our being, not quite yet realized, still in formation, and dependent on some previously unforeseen happening to unleash their potential in our lives. In some strange way, these too, carry the stamp of Artistry. Art, in all of its forms, somehow allows to us to look upon, and hint at, those things which we cannot view in a straightforward way. Artistry gives birth to the Encounter of im/possibility which we are able to meet with arms open, acting out of faith, hope, and love.

Augustine’s question, “who do I love when I say I love my God?” is an apt one. It’s honest. For all of our highly articulated dogma’s or “namings” we must acknowledge, in the end, that a question mark lingers with the person of God. The face of God, unrevealed to Moses, is still no more revealed to us. A hazy gauze lingers there, and a promise that one day “we will know even as we are presently known.” In other words, the “event” of God–the experience–is still a Mystery (something known but not understood). While we have many names for this underlying event (and it takes all of them to even begin to touch the event they house), no one of them takes the cake, so to speak.

But my point isn’t that we shouldn’t attempt to give name, or honor the particularity of names (such as Jesus). Like the writer of the gospel of John, I think it would take all the words in the human language, and fill all the books ever written, to describe the presence of God. No, I think part of what we must do is labor to give birth to better and higher articulations. My feeling is that we must exhaust every available resource in the knowing of God in order to fall backwards into enjoyment; tossing our hands up and proclaiming, “this is a mystery.”

So I search for better names and better namings. Last night I came across a simply beautiful phrasing of “the event of God.” I was really blown away by it. I think this most clearly articulates my current understanding of who God is and how we interact with Godself. It’s from a book I’ve been reading called, “The Sparrow“. This is a lovely novel. I can almost guarentee it will make my top 2009 list. Amazing. If you haven’t read it, please consider doing so. Anyhow, here is the part I was drawn to, a working definition of who I love when I say “I love you my God”:

There are times…when we are in the midst of life–moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness–times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth…

…when we search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we [may] call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we [may] call it praying.

Isn’t that beautiful? I know that some will object to its universality, rather than its particularity (Russell doesn’t point to any one religion in this passage as the “name above all names” does she?). Still, let’s not cut off our nose to spite the face. Or in this case perhaps, let’s not cut off the face to eccentuate the nose. The experiences and names we give God will (conceivably) be particular to our situations and context. I don’t think we have to work at bringing God down to our context, if anything we have to work at allowing God to be as big as s/he is. As one of my friends put it, “there are thousands of types of lungs, thousands of ways to breathe in the air–still there is only one air…and I’m not sure if it cares what you call it…it still does it’s job” (my paraphrase). We do well to remember the differences and diversity–we also do well to remember the unity and BIGNESS of God.

One final thought: if God is indeed who I imagine him to be then he will most certainly be bigger than my ability to imagine him.

I believe in God the way I believe in quarks, ” she said coolly. “People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me that they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did.”–From “the Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell, pg 110.

I assume that I am not an expert on quarks. I assume I have very little to say on the matter. I haven’t studied it, I haven’t spent a lifetime of experiment and experience on the subject. I don’t feel left out or stupid or unknowledgable or out of my league or judged or condemned or as if I should come up with something to say on the matter when in the presence of jargon talking physicists. I simply sit, listen, and hope to glean what little I can, and I apply what little I’ve gained. Why is it that we imagine religion, the religious question, differently? I suspect I know why. I can’t help but wonder if because we create God in our own image, we expect ourselves to have an expert opinion on the matter. And of course we are experts on God, because more often than not s/he is simply the glass ceiling of our own imagination, conveniently validating all of our preconceptions.

I’ve been starting my mornings and then continuing my days with poetry. Poems tend to hint at things that can’t be seen straight on. They elucidate the hazy feeling of Being. I for one struggle through them, feeling confined by their lines, symmetry, and schemes; only to be opened up to another world in reflection. Here are a couple of poems out of books I’ve been enjoying lately.